Governor Lets Family Clinics Bill Become Law

Bowing to pressure from fellow Republicans, Gov. George Deukmejian on Wednesday allowed a $20-million family-planning bill to become law without his signature, thus avoiding a veto override attempt and dousing a smoldering political issue.

The bill, passed overwhelmingly by both the Senate and Assembly despite Deukmejian’s veto threats, restores $20 million of the $24 million that the governor cut last July from the Legislature’s proposed $36-million funding package for private, nonprofit family-planning clinics.

Before the cuts, the 500 clinics annually served 470,000 people--most of them poor women--providing such services as birth-control advice and prescriptions, Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, breast exams, screening for sexually transmitted diseases and testing for the AIDS virus.

More than 31,000 low-income women in Orange County use family-planning agencies, according to the local chapter of Planned Parenthood.

“It’s tough to rationalize going to war over this issue,” said Senate Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno upon hearing of the governor’s action. He echoed the sentiments of most GOP legislators.

Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) said Deukmejian’s decision showed that the conservative governor was facing considerable opposition from his colleagues in the Republican Party.

“It shows that Republicans are not just cardboard, cookie-cutter conservatives,” said Bergeson, who voted for the restoration of the family-planning funds. “The governor was faced with a difficult decision, with such strong support from conservative factions as well as moderate factions.”

“Yahoo!” exclaimed Norma K. Clevenger, a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood. “Can you believe it? The governor is finally paying attention to the support for family-planning programs from the public, from the Legislature and from the Republican Party.”

Officials with family-planning agencies in Orange County agreed, suggesting that it marked an important shift.

Barbara Jackson, public affairs director for Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties, said she and others were pleased that Deukmejian “finally acknowledged the broad-based support for family planning in California.”

“I don’t think it was an easy decision for the Republicans to make,” Jackson added. “I’m impressed that they would give the governor that message and that he would acknowledge it.”

Deukmejian seemed to go through a long, complex maze of conflicting thought processes before arriving at his decision on Wednesday, the final day that he could sign or veto the measure without it becoming law without his signature.

Early last year, the governor worried about the clinics promoting abortion. More important in his view, he said he felt that the state could not afford the programs. Later he twice indicated a willingness to compromise. But recently he was irked by a court challenge to his authority to cut the funds. And he decided he did not care much for the programs anyway.

In the end, Deukmejian looked into a political abyss and flinched, though somewhat defiantly. Republicans--including the likely GOP gubernatorial nominee, U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson--had pressured him to restore the money, fearing that Republicans could be tagged with being insensitive to poor women and also become vulnerable to the attacks of abortion-rights activists.

Spirit of Cooperation

“I am willing to yield to the majority of the Legislature on this bill to relieve them of a potentially prolonged and difficult process and to continue to maintain the spirit of cooperation between the Legislature and the governor,” Deukmejian said in a prepared statement, referring indirectly to compromises on several other major issues that he had negotiated with lawmakers last year. That spirit of good-will recently has been threatened by the simmering fight over family-planning funds.

Although Deukmejian backed away from his objections to the family-planning programs, he sternly declared that “I am steadfast in my commitment to maintain the fiscal health of state government.” Therefore, the governor said, he expects the Legislature “to act in a fiscally responsible manner” and reduce other programs in the next state budget to make up for the added family-planning expenditures. He placed these costs at $44 million--$20 million during the current fiscal year and $24 million in the next.

Deukmejian adamantly defended his action in vetoing the funds in the first place, declaring that those and other cuts “were proven to be essential” to provide a reserve for “unanticipated expenditures, such as the (Bay Area) earthquake.”

The lame-duck governor insisted that he was confident that if he had vetoed the bill, he would have escaped his first veto override. GOP lawmakers would have supported him, he said. While this seemed to be a correct analysis of the situation, Republicans wanted to avoid a Democrat-led override attempt that would focus more public attention on the volatile issue.

“I was very pleased with his decision because it would permit the Legislature to focus on the important issues that we need to address, specifically the budget,” said Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim). “Had we gone through a veto-override attempt, we would have been expending energy and time focusing on that instead of the budget.”

Noting that negotiators had achieved compromises in the bill that “satisfied an overwhelming majority” of Republican lawmakers, Deukmejian said he decided against vetoing the measure “in order to put this issue behind us and to enable us to go forward with the ambitious agenda that I have outlined in my recent State of the State Address.”

Wilson Is Relieved

Nobody was more relieved with Deukmejian’s action then Sen. Wilson, who describes himself as “pro-choice” on abortion and did not relish the prospect of defending the governor’s action this year while campaigning for his job. “We recognize that Gov. Deukmejian is a man of conviction, but we also recognize that some resolution of this matter was needed,” said a Wilson adviser, who asked not to be identified. “We think the conclusion he reached was a good one.”

Deukmejian made no mention in his statement of the lawsuit, now pending in the state Supreme Court, that challenges a governor’s right to use his “blue pencil” to veto money for family planning. The governor previously had fretted that to restore the money now would make it seem as if he were surrendering to the plaintiffs and setting a bad precedent.

A Deukmejian adviser, speaking anonymously, said Wednesday that the governor now expects the plaintiffs to drop the suit. “But if they want to pursue the case, we’ll pursue it; we’re very confident,” he said.

Times staff writers Jerry Gillam, Carl Ingram, Ralph Frammolino and Eric Bailey contributed to this story.